Yay! Readers :)

Well thanks for the comments :). It's nice to be able to talk here. Besides dyscalculia, i actually have alot of other issues or problems so to speak. Like I'm trying to learn some music theory now because I sing, but its difficult seeing a lot of lines and circles and then remember which sounds like what. and what letter it is :S. It's terribly hard to remember. Like most of what i remember is that it goes FACE in the spaces, but on the lines i dont remember the things are, and thinking backwards alphabetically is very slow for me too, like C B A G F E D C.

Whew

What a relief. I performed for my jazz exam today. Last night I was like basically passing out in pain from my abdominal pain from my period, and basically took a painkiller and just feel asleep. Woke up at 6am with some slight pain again, and well actually, ive run out of painkillers again i should go fetch some now :o. I just take paracetemol. Well but i feel good!! Ive only taken one paracetemol today and much less pain than yesterday, its always a joy to be pain free, after experiencing how bad it feels to be in pain :o. I was a little stressed in the morning, cos i forgot my map, so i had to go to the examination (its at some building i haven't been to before) by memory and by asking around, glad i made it!

Heya!

Hey, wow I didn't know people read this!
It has been really long since I posted, I guess lately I've been doing alot of things that make me forget I had dyscalculia. I've been drawing, learning languages, singing, and doing the things I enjoy since I've been out of highschool for quite some time!

I've played alot of those brain training games on the Nintendo DS also. It doesn't just have number games, it has all kinds of games... which I enjoy playing :). I just found that in a different environment, and at a more relaxed pace, i can do this better (adding, subtracting, multiplication... i was always better at division, it makes more sense for some reason :D, dividing things!). I don't feel the pressure anymore from being with my parents, or at school, or feeling stupid about it, and knowing that I'm not stupid. So the reason I started the blog was to release some of the pain I felt from it, actually didn't even know the blog was listed :).

But now I have read the comments (got rid of the spam even :o, wow didn't even know they would find it, I guess blogger is so much more popular now then when I first started blogging! Which was... wow, I started this blog 4 years ago, but I have some older blogs even :) wow I'm getting old ;P but its just all numbers anyway ;).

Anyway, if anyone has some suggestions about what to write on this site, feel free to comment :). Also, I think it helps to comment on your own experiences! I think the blog is easy to find, so maybe it can help more people with dyscalculia, to share our experiences.

I don't know if it's just me, or that I'm kind of a creative artsy person, because even though I enjoy maths as a concept, the actual 'doing sums' and doing equations was very boring to me to, and I guess its very hard for me to focus on accurate number crunching. For me its more like concentration practice now. I used to really confuse number and signs, and for myself it was more like this lack of attention where I would just see things differently + x - and the divide sign (which I can't type on this keyboard :S)... they all look similar if you rotate it, or take off some dots :p.
I'm very good at those rotating puzzles where you have to find out which dice is the right one for the flat layout etc. I used to see the guy in my upper maths class have to cut out a sheet of paper to find out... to me it was so easy to model things in my head, and i can make it inside my imagination anyway. But like things that I had to rote learn, i had trouble with.

To expand a bit on my childhood history, I think I had some trauma from when my dad said I couldnt come out of the bathroom till I had learn my times tables (forgot which line of the tables, but anyway). I wasn't locked in there, but it was very stressful, and I was crying, having to memorise some stuff that made no sense, it was just a list of numbers. They were such bad parents. But yeah, in elementary school I was really slow doing the timetables, and the class would go round in a circle and have to say them. It made no sense then, it was just a list of numbers.

Now when I add and substract I can just visualise it. I just see it as blocks or something, and I use 10 as a base, and I can chop bits off to add together to 10, and see whats left, and then that's what it is. Like 8 + 7 is taking 2 off the 7 to make a complete block, and so i have 15. So everytime i add stuff, im just chopping stuff in my head. I think its faster though to know the multiplication tables well than to visualise it, for me at least. But I think there should be no pressure on kids to learn them, they should be shown patterns in them to help them remember, instead of rote learning, rote-learning is boring and doesn't help people understanding. When people have a deeper understanding of things, the whole subject becomes alot easier to understand.

Einstein Maze

Uh, that's weird. I solved it in under a minute, not 10! All you have to do is follow a route, if it dont work, turn back. It's so easy :S

Alternatives

Health and age - Alternative medacine page
There are a lot of alternative treatments for certain ailments. The best part about this page is it tells you what vitamins and minerals you might be deficient in.

See ya!

The Matrix

Oh now I know what a matrix is...
(and listening to hall of the bandit lord?)

By the way, you must check this out (Natural Math's "An Adventure in Number Sense"

What a matrix is, is some part of the timestable. Because you are cross-multipling different corners of a rectangle in the table, they always add up to the same thing.

And all the squares you make in the times table, the values add to a square number!

Bingo! Times tables and Arithmetic Progression

Noone ever explained Arithmetic Progression to me as a kid.
Now it's so easy!! I sure could have solved some of those problems they gave me in highschool... (in fact, all of them).

Say if someone asked you to add all the numbers from 1 to 100.

Every number can be put together in pairs, for example, 100 + 1, and 99 + 2. They all equal 101. So there are 50 pairs (half of 100 numbers), so the total adds up to 101x50, which is 5050. (5000 + 50).

Arithmetic progression

I'm going to create a arithmetic progression.
It goes like this:

2 6 10 14 18 22 26 30 34 38

So there are 10 numbers.

so there are 5 pairs.

The first pair adds to 40. So 5 x 40 = 200.

Rule: To find the sum of an arithmetic progression, you add the first and the last number of the progression, and then multiply by a half of the number of numbers in the progression.

So it works for odd numbers too.
I want to find the answer to this progression for 13 numbers. So there are 6 and a half pairs.

6.5 x 40 = 220.

Seven times tables...

I get stuck on a few. Because of the terrible rote learning technique employed by my parents, half my times table memory (not half, but some of the bigger numbers) are currently wiped out and I have to rebuild.

63 is 7x9 because all the 9xs digits, add to 9.
42 is easy to remember because it also adds to 6.
21 adds to 3.

So basically 3, 6, 9 times 7, all add up their digits. So that is easy to remember.

The 4s and 8xs are all EVEN numbers.
so 28 = 7 x 4, 56 = 8 x 7.
8/2 is 4, so that is easy to remember.

So the hardest is 8 x 7. I can remember that 8 + 7 = 15. And then I take that 5, and take that 1, 1+5 = the last digit, and 1x5 = the first digit, so 56

So if I see 56, i can remember 15, and what adds to 15? Cant be less than 5, can't be 6 because of the 9xs table pattern, so its 7, or 8. 7x8.

And... 49 is 7x7
6x6 = 36 and incidentally 4x9 also =36...

Also check out:
The Resource Room

Fun and Games

Try the BBC Skillwise website for numeracy games.

For some hardcore maths needs, try the Math Centre, where you can do online excercises, and teach yourself, high school math concepts.

Maths Trauma

I remember being told by my dad that I had to stay in the bathroom until I learnt my timestables. That was horrible and traumatising. I knew 2x, 10x, 5x, probably 4x and 3x too, but the others I could not see a pattern in. I was an intelligent child, and I can't rote learn. Of all the terrible things they have done to me, I remember this also. It was so painful.

How the timetables should be taught to kids with dyscalculia,
(quoted from the Education Standards site, UK

"One of the most frequently occurring problems for dyslexic learners and dyscalculic learners is not being able to (rote) learn the times tables, so a possible alternative is to use the facts the child knows to work out the facts they don’t know. This has an additional bonus of teaching further understanding of numbers and number relationships.
The facts that can be learnt (and the child does have to have some facts) are 1x, 2x, 5x and 10x. Other facts can be derived from these, a strategy advocated in the NNS for 4x, for example:
5x can be obtained by halving 10x facts (also useful for percentage work)
4x facts are done by using 2x twice as in 4 x 7 as 2 x 7 = 14 and 2 x 14 = 28
9x facts are derived from 10x facts using the pattern n x 9 = n x10 – n as in 7 x 9 = 7 x 10 - 7
3x facts are done by doubling the number and adding the number as in 3 x 6 = 2 x 6 + 6 = 12 + 6 = 18
6x facts are similar but using 5xn and 1xn as in 6 x 8 = 5 x 8 + 8 = 40 + 8 = 48
7x facts are computed from 5x and 2x facts as 5n + 2n, for example 7 x 3 = 5 x 3 + 2 x 3…………………
and if you teach the commutative property (e.g. 4 x 3 = 3 x 4) then there is only 8x8 left, which can be done by a triple sequence of doubling, starting with 8."

So how do I recover from Dyscalculia?

Well, I am not a child anymore, so I can't undo the things that have happened to me. I don't respect the people who did it to me, and I never will, that is my only vengeance.

Other than that, I am now finding resources to relearn what I have missed. So far, I am a more stable person, still not totally stable, I am still prone to intense periods of depression, that seem to dissapate by themselves for whatever reason.

Here are some good links to understand what Dyscalculia and Dyslexia is like, and what you can do for your own maths skills:

Misunderstood Minds: PBS special
BBC: Skillwise on Dyscalculia

How I got Dyscalculia...

At first, I never knew I had it. For a long time, I probably didn't. When I was 15 I still got 94% in Maths, but the weird thing was, the question I did get wrong, was about numbers. It was something simple, like what is a million, or 10 million, or something like that, written in numerals, but I didn't know it. I never knew it, was it relevant to my life anyway?

The point is, maybe for people with dyscalculia, a lot of things aren't relevant. I didn't get 94% in Maths because I could remember things, I got it because I could solve things logically. Same with Physics. I got a B then, and by that time I wasn't concentrating anymore (nobody found I had ADD, because it was ADHD, and I wasn't hyperactive, it didn't really show). I was still a 'good' student by school standards, but I knew my work was slipping, and my attention for anything was slipping. Meanwhile, I was falling into depression.

By the time I got to university, it only got worst. I was devoid of any maths or science, because I was doing Art, but I was devoid of any motivation too. I was introverted, and I hardly hung out with anybody, even if I wanted to. I was very reclusive, maybe because noone invited me anywhere. I was on a verge of a crisis, so I did break down. I was really miserable and lonely, and wanted to die. I went on a trip, and at the same time, left university, because emotionally I couldn't deal with it. I went away, and went home when I ran out of money.

I was having a rough time with my parents, I still do. The cause of my depression and mania has always been them, and I am pretty sure what they have done to me would constitute abuse, in one way or another.

So what I am saying is, if you connect the dots, a lot of the reason why people fall into ADD or dyscalculia has more to do with social relationships, than with genetics, attention, or maths.

I am a intelligent person. And my IQ is higher than average. And it was really, really high when I was a child. Somehow things went bad for me, and while I'm not less intelligent, I haven't been able to grow and improve as exponentially as I did as a child, and I am now hindered by basic numeracy skills which I could not get due to emotional and mental stress.

Welcome to Dyscalculia!

My name is Calculia, (C for short), and here to take you on a journey through what it's like to have Dyscalculia (which is a learning disability to do with maths).